The Need for Bread
by catiepie182002
Summary: Everybody needs beauty as well as bread. Or: Sansa/Tyrion ageplay.


The Need for Bread

_Written for one of the many ASoIaF/GoT kinkmemes._

He is small enough that it is easy to forget he is not a child, his face pressed against her breasts and his hands fisted - like tiny claws that have been filed to bluntness, she thinks - in the delicate fabric of her shift. It hasn't been a particularly trying day, no more trying than all the rest since they've returned to Winterfell to rebuild the ruins of her father's castle, but still Sansa wants nothing more than to wrap herself around Tyrion and never move from this spot again. She splays her fingers along his back, feels the cold that has seeped under his furs and under his jerkin and nestled itself between his skin and his smallclothes. The smell of snow still lingers on him, lingers on them all, and Sansa lets his hair tickle her nose as she breathes it in, reminded of summer snows that clung to her brothers' hair and made it seem they'd gone white before their time.

"I never knew my mother," Tyrion says, his voice seeming to echo within the cage of her arms, and she shushes him.

"I know." Her own mother is dead now too, and her father, and her brother Robb who had never had the chance to see his hair fade to white. There is a familiar tightness at the back of her throat, and sometimes still her eyes burn as if she is blinking sea water. Where once Sansa might have bitten her lip against her tears, she pulls Tyrion tighter against her and and ghosts her lips over the crown of his head. _Queen Cersei was wrong, _she thinks,_ tears are not a weapon, but a salve,_ letting them prick against her lids. Queen Cersei was wrong about many things.

Tyrion is hard against her, a realization that might once have made her squirm, her belly coiled uncomfortably, but she enjoys pleasing him now, the way he enjoys pleasing her. Anyway, it is not her body he desires tonight, not truly. She knows that now, even as she patiently ignores the feel of his hardness along her thigh. "It is said your mother was a lovely woman," Sansa whispers, and she believes it. Tyrion is capable of great gentleness, a quality he could not have learned from his father. (Most of what Sansa knows of Tywin Lannister she has learned from Tyrion, and she likes not a word of it.) She likes to imagine it is something bestowed on him at birth, something shared by a mother and son who were denied the chance to share anything else - and why not? (Gentleness can be born of suffering, she knows, but so too can callousness - or else would not everyone be gentle? They have all known their share of suffering.) She recognizes the shades of her own mother and father in her every movement - how many times had the Lady Catelyn bundled her tight against some imagined fear?

This is a role she knows well, though she and Tyrion have no son or daughter of their own.

"She must have been, for my father to bear the grudge of her loss for a quarter of a century." There is an old guilt tucked away in his words, beneath the bitterness Tyrion expects of himself. It makes Sansa's heart struggle against her breast, she is so angry. This anger, too, is old; apparently, she does not forgive easily. Tyrion had been a child; he should not have borne the blame for his mother's death, and when she looks at Tyrion, noseless and gentle and swallowed up in their feather bed, she thinks she would like to have killed Tywin herself.

Sansa had once thought she could never love a kinslayer, but then, she'd also thought she could never love a dwarf. And anyway, Tywin Lannister had hardly been a father to Tyrion at all.

"Your father wronged you," she says, for the tenth, the hundredth, the thousandth time. (She suspects he never tires of hearing it.) "But what would your mother have been, I wonder? What would she have done for you?" Tyrion stills, nothing to say to that, and Sansa scoots herself lower on the pillow until her nose is brushing the place where his should be. It takes a moment for him to meet her eyes - he still mislikes being scrutinized so closely - but he does not flinch under her gaze. She wants to tell him that his mother would have thought him handsome - and she would have, Sansa is sure of it, in the way that all boys are knights and girls princesses in their mother's eyes. But to tell him that seems cheap, somehow. His is not a pretty face, but it is Tyrion's face, and that is enough.

It is the most natural thing in the world for her fingers to trail down the side of Tyrion's cheek, skirting just around the ruin that mars the middle of his face, though she cannot avoid the scar altogether. (It doesn't bother her anymore - Tyrion's lack of a nose is as much a part of his face as Sansa's having one is hers - but the area remains sensitive to her touch.) "Would she do this?" Sansa asks, pressing a kiss to his forehead as she cradles his face. She leaves her lips there for a beat too long for the kiss to be considered entirely maternal, and Tyrion's skin flushes hot beneath her.

There's a certain shame to being cared for like this when one has not cultivated the skill of accepting such care gracefully. Her husband is the type of man who would like her to believe that he would turn away such careful advances with a twist of the mouth and a snide remark, but in moments like this, he is hardly a man at all. Rather, she sees him as the boy he must have been once, not so much smaller than he is now, with a father and a sister who despise him, with countless people around him and none who would choose to be there. Who whisper that was born as a punishment to his father behind the man's back and call him words like 'imp' and 'monster' out in the open.

The thought makes Sansa's chest clench painfully - even now she does not abide unkind quips about Tyrion in her presence, especially when he makes them himself - and she gathers him still closer, so their foreheads are touching. "Would she have told you how good you are?" Turning her head, she allows her lips to brush against his ear as she speaks. He shivers. "How kind and gentle. How brave and smart."

Tyrion makes a strangled noise, like he wants to disagree, but can't quite bring himself to stop her. It is clearly a struggle, as it always is; he's imagined these words so many times he can't pretend he doesn't relish them. This is a dance they know well; in the end, try as he might to throw off the shackles of his father's disregard, he won't dispute her. "She would have been so proud of you." Sansa's voice is so low she can barely hear it. Her thoughts are louder: she might not be his mother, but she can oblige.

Sansa gives him nothing she does not believe is the truth; this is a fantasy, but one that could have been real if only the gods had been a little easier on them both. "My sweet boy," she offers as she rises to her knees and pulls his tunic over his head, the way she would for a child too young to do it himself. There are goosepimples on his skin, and she smoothes them away with the press of her palm on his chest, careful to keep her touch innocent. (Her husband's body may be his greatest burden, but it is no burden for her to share it with him.) "My prince." She doesn't have to search for the words; they come to her effortlessly.

The servants have run a bath to warm the two of them and ease the ache in their muscles from riding, and Tyrion is pliant in her hands, waiting - for once - in expectant silence for what she might say next. Sansa doesn't blame him - the first time, she had shocked even herself. (Tyrion has proven her capable of many things she had never imagined, perhaps because he has never seemed surprised by her strength.) But as she prepares to bathe her husband, clamping down on her own flash of desire - a familiar warmth stirring between her thighs - Sansa finds it does not feel at all strange.

They have each washed away so many stains for the other; why not this too?

_End._


End file.
